When Attorney General Ed Meese resigned last year, he was
found innocent of wrongdoing but the media still portrayed him
as an example of what news accounts called the "ethical
insensitivity" of the Republican administration. But less than a
year later, when Speaker of the House Jim Wright resigned
rather than face action by the House Committee on Standards of Official
Conduct, reporters assumed a new emphasis, growing concerned
that an "ethics war" was damaging the political process. Meese
was "the crown jewel of the sleaze factor;" Wright a
"casualty of the ethics thunderstorm."

That's the double standard MediaWatch analysts
documented by studying how the media covered Meese and Wright
when each resigned from office. First, coverage of Meese's resignation
focused on his personal ethics problems, while reports of
Wright's resignation focused on the fate of the House in the
midst of "mindless cannibalism." Second, the media used
differing terminologies to report the controversies of Meese and
Wright, focusing on the "sleaze factor" for Meese and "ethics
war" for Wright. To measure these trends, analysts investigated
print reports in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, and viewed broadcasts of ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, CNN PrimeNews and NBC Nightly News.

1. THEMES. To study the dominant themes underlying both episodes, MediaWatch compared
stories within the first four days of Meese's resignation
announcement on July 5, 1988 and the release of special
prosecutor James McKay's report on July 18. For Wright, we
surveyed the first four days after his May 31 speech to the
House.

a) Continuing ethical/legal problems. Although special
prosecutor James McKay failed to indict Meese, 12 of 25 print
stories (48%) and four out of nine network segments (44%)
predicted further difficulties for Meese, most notably an
investigation by the Justice Department'sOffice of Professional
Responsibility. Despite possible Justice Department investigations
against Wright, however, only two of nine network stories (22%) and
two of 25 print stories (8%) speculated on further troubles. Not
one newspaper account touched on further ethical problems for
the Speaker, focusing instead on stories like the Los Angeles Times' "'Liberated' Wright Explains Why He Resigned."

b) Partisan atmosphere. The tenor of the Wright coverage was
stringently critical of the "partisan bloodbath" that led to
Wright's resignation. 21 out of 30 print stories (70%) and 7 of
12 broadcast reports (58%) described some form of "partisan
rancor" on Capitol Hill when Wright quit. As Michael Oreskes led
off coverage in The New York Times June 1: "The House to which
Speaker Jim Wright announced today his plan to resign is a House
beset with fear, one in which every rumor, every phone call
from a reporter, every partisan spat could be the beginning of
the end of a career." Although the investigation by the House
ethics committee took more than a year to complete, the Los Angeles Times
headlined a June 2 story "Rush to Judge Politicians Held
Damaging to Nation." Out of this atmosphere, ABC's Jim Wooten
could sympathetically report of Wright: "And if his moving
speech today does not restore those decencies he so wistfully
remembered today, then perhaps history remembered that at least he
tried." But Meese got no such treatment. In 25 print stories, only
one New York Times story (or 4 percent of articles)
mentioned in passing that "old-line conservatives" thought
partisanship might have been involved. None of the nine evening
news stories raised the issue.

Headlines and subtitles were also a signal of the double standard. When Meese protested McKay's report, the Newsweek headline read "Meese Plays the Martyr." When Wright resigned, Time asked "Have We Gone Too Far?" Los Angeles Times subtitles were just as pronounced: in one Meese story, the Times
used "'Became a Caricature'," "Other Failures," and "'Personal
Obtuseness'." In Wright articles, subtitles included "Embraced
by Colleagues," "'Hounded from Office'," and "Atmosphere of
Mistrust."

2. TERMS. A comparison of ethics terminology
illustrates how the media presented the debate to the Democrats'
advantage on both occasions. "Sleaze factor" was used to
describe Republican appointees accused of impropriety, whether
they were eventually found guilty or not. But the martial
metaphors of an "ethics war" over Speaker Wright implicitly
charged Republicans with dirty pool and excused the Democratic
corruption by portraying them as the victims of a "partisan
bloodbath."

In 1988, reporters from newspapers and magazines made
unattributed reference to the "sleaze factor" 56 times, mostly
as a description of the Reagan Administration's "legacy of easy
ethical virtue," as The New York Times put it. To media minds,
the term related only to Republican ethics controversies. Thus,
Sen. Lloyd Bentsen's deflated ploy to charge lobbyists $10,000
for breakfast "might blunt" or "make it tougher to exploit" the
Democrats' use of the "sleaze factor" instead of being an
example of the "sleaze factor." In spite of all the ethics
coverage, reporters used the term only 6 times so far in 1989.

But in the aftermath of the Wright resignation, print
reporters made unattributed use of a thesaurus of "ethics war"
terminology (including "ethics purge," "ethics reign of terror,"
and "ethics epidemic") 37 times, often in headlines. Newsweek made "Ethics Wars" a section heading for all its Wright stories in its June 12 edition.

In contrast, conservative phrase coiners were stiffed. Only
three print news stories in 1989 mentioned Newt Gingrich's pet
phrase "corrupt liberal welfare state," and when they did it
came with criticism: The Washington Post's Myra McPherson
wrote "Newtisms have indeed appalled members on both sides of
the aisle." In fact, print stories that included the words
"corrupt" or "corruption" with unattributed reference to the
Democrats, have appeared only 16 times so far this year, and
most of them showed up in sentences like "Democrats tired of
being lumped together as corrupt and venal will support Wright as a
demonstration of their own self-worth." This sentence by Tom
Kenworthy appeared in the only Washington Post news story to use the word "corrupt" anywhere near the name of Jim Wright since the beginning of May.

Impartiality in ethics coverage requires that scandals
involving liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans be
covered in a balanced fashion, with a single standard. Circumstances
may differ, but to tar the accused conservative Republican in one
case and then assail the conservative Republican accuser in the
next is proof positive of a double standard.

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